MY-BASIC Quick Reference Copyright (C) 2011 – 2021 Tony Wang https://github.com/paladin-t/my_basic 1. Introduction MY-BASIC is a lightweight BASIC interpreter written in standard C in dual files. It aims to be embeddable, extendable and portable. It is a dynamic typed programming language, reserves structured syntax, supports a style of prototype-based programming (OOP), also implements a functional paradigm by lambda abstraction. The core is written in a C source file and an associated header file. It's easy to either use it as a standalone interpreter or embed it with existing projects in C, C++, Java, Objective-C, Swift, C#, etc. and totally customizable by adding your own scripting interface. It's also possible to learn how to build an interpreter from scratch, or build your own dialect based on it. This manual is a quick reference on how to program with MY-BASIC, what it does and what does not, how to use it and extend it as a scripting programming language. For the latest revision or other information, see https://github.com/paladin-t/my_basic. 2. Programming with BASIC The well-known programming language BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code; when we mention BASIC today, we often refer to the BASIC family, not any specific one. The BASIC family has a long history since the original BASIC was designed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire; and BASIC is famous because it is easy to learn and use all the time. Thanks to all BASIC dedicators and fanatics, the passion affected many people like me, and guided us to the computer world. MY-BASIC offers a structured BASIC syntax, and many other retro and modern features. It would be familiar to you if you have ever programmed with another BASIC dialect, or other programming languages. Getting started You can download the latest MY-BASIC package from https://github.com/paladin-t/my_basic/archive/master.zip or check out the source code to make a build manually. You can get the latest revision by git clone https://github.com/paladin-t/my_basic.git. In this part let’s get start using the MY-BASIC interpreter, which comes as follow: The close square bracket is an input prompt. Starting with a “Hello World” convention in MY-BASIC: ‘ Hello world tutorial input “What is your name: “, n$ def greeting(a, b) return a + “ “ + b + “ by “ + n$ + “.” enddef print greeting(“Hello”, “world”); Like other BASIC dialects, MY-BASIC is case-insensitive; in another word PRINT A$ and Print a$ mean all the same. You will get a greeting text after input the above code, then input a RUN command and hinting Enter. Any text begins with a single quote until the end of that line is a comment (a.k.a. remark) which won’t influence the logic of a program; a comment does not perform anything, but just a short explanation of code. It’s possible to use the classic REM statement to start a comment as well. MY-BASIC is configurable with macros, this manual is written with default configuration. Multi-line comment MY-BASIC also supports multi-line comment, which is a small advantage comparing to other dialects. It’s surrounded by ‘[ and ’], eg. print “Begin”; ‘[ print “This line won’t be executed!”; print “This is also ignored”; ‘] print “End”; MY-BASIC ignores all comment lines between them. It is convenient to simply modify ‘[ to ‘‘[ to uncomment all lines. Support for Unicode Unicode is widely used nowadays for international text representation; MY-BASIC supports both Unicode based identifier and string manipulations. Eg. print "你好" + "世界"; 日本語 = "こんにちは" print 日本語, ", ", len(日本語); Keywords There are some keywords and reserved functions in MY-BASIC as follow: Keywords REM, NIL, MOD, AND, OR, NOT, IS, LET, DIM, IF, THEN, ELSEIF, ELSE, ENDIF, FOR, IN, TO, STEP, NEXT, WHILE, WEND, DO, UNTIL, EXIT, GOTO, GOSUB, RETURN, CALL, DEF, ENDDEF, CLASS, ENDCLASS, ME, NEW, VAR, REFLECT, LAMBDA, MEM, TYPE, IMPORT, END Reserved Standard ABS, SGN, SQR, FLOOR, CEIL, FIX, ROUND, functions library SRND, RND, SIN, COS, TAN, ASIN, ACOS, ATAN, EXP, LOG, ASC, CHR, LEFT, LEN, MID, RIGHT, STR, VAL, PRINT, INPUT Collection LIST, DICT, PUSH, POP, BACK, INSERT, library SORT, EXISTS, INDEX_OF, GET, SET, REMOVE, CLEAR, CLONE, TO_ARRAY, ITERATOR, MOVE_NEXT It is not accepted to use these words for user-defined identifiers; in addition there are two more predefined boolean constants, a.k.a. TRUE and FALSE, as implied literally, represent boolean value true and false, it’s not accepted to reassign these symbols with other values. Details of keywords and functions will be explained latter in this manual. Operators All operators in MY-BASIC as follow: Operators +, -, *, /, ^, =, <, >, <=, >=, <> These operators are used in calculation or comparison expressions. Besides, the keywords MOD, AND, OR, NOT, IS also work as operators. An expression is evaluated from left to right, with top down priorities as follow: Level Operation 1 ( ) (explicit priority indicator) 2 - (negative), NOT 3 ^ 4 *, /, MOD 5 +, - (minus) 6 <, >, <=, >=, <>, = (equal comparison) 7 AND, OR, IS 8 = (assignment) MOD stands for modulus, a.k.a. % in some other programming languages. The caret symbol ^ stands for power operation. Data types and operations MY-BASIC is a dynamic programming language, therefore variables don’t have types, but values do. The built-in types are: Nil, Integer, Real, String, Type, Array, List, List Iterator, Dictionary, Dictionary Iterator, Prototype (a.k.a. “Class”), and Sub Routine (including Lambda). Besides, MY-BASIC also supports user defined data types (Usertype and Referenced Usertype) to customize your own data structures. Nil is a special type which includes only one valid value NIL, a.k.a. null, none, nothing, etc. It disposes/unreferences the previous value of a variable by assigning it with nil. A Type typed value represents the type of a value, it will be explained with the TYPE statement. Integer and real are defined as int and float C types, which are both 32bit long under most compilers. You can redefine them as other types such as long, long long, double and long double by modifying a few lines of code. Since there is no dedicated boolean type, it’s defined as integer also, and can be assigned from any expression. A boolean expression results to false with NIL, FALSE, and 0; it results to true with all other values including blank string “”. MY-BASIC accepts literal numbers in HEX and OCT. A hexadecimal number begins with a 0x prefix, and an octadic begins with a 0. Eg. 0x10 (HEX) equals to 020 (OCT) equals to 16 (DEC). A variable identifier is formed with letters, numbers, underline and an optional dollar postfix, but it must begin with a letter or an underline. It’s not designed to use type specifier for variable, and you don’t need to declare it before using it. You don’t need to make conversion between integer and float values manually, generally MY-BASIC stores numbers with proper data type automatically. The dollar sigil $ is reserved from traditional BASIC dialects as a valid postfix of a variable identifier. But it doesn’t denote for type of string in most cases. However, there are special cases that $ does mean something with the DIM and INPUT statements. An assignment statement consists of an optional beginning keyword LET and a following assignment expression. Eg. let a = 1 ‘ Assignment statement begins with LET pi = 3.14 ‘ Another assignment statement without LET MY-BASIC supports array up to four dimensions by default, which is defined by a macro. Array is a kind of regular collection data structure in programming. An array can store a set of data that each element can be accessed by the array name and subscripts. An array must be declared by a DIM (short for dimension) statement before using, eg. dim nums(10) dim strs$(2, 5) The common naming rule for an array is same to naming a variable, actually all user identifiers in MY-BASIC follow the same rule. An array can be either a collection of real or string values, depends on whether the identifier ends up with a $ sigil. Dimensions are separated by commas. Array indexes begin from zero in MY-BASIC therefore nums(0) is the first element of array nums, it is a bit different from other BASIC, but more common in modern programming languages. An array index could be a non-negative integer value formed as a constant, a variable of integer or an expression which results an integer; invalid index may cause an out of bound error. It is possible to concatenate two Strings together using the plus operator +. Each string concatenating generates a new string object with memory allocation. It is also possible to apply comparison operators to Strings, which starts comparing the first character of both string, if they are equal to each other, it continues checking the following ones until a difference occurs or reaching the end of any one; then return an integer value indicating the difference. Structured routine It is possible to extract reusable code blocks with sub routines. MY-BASIC supports both structured routine with the CALL/DEF/ENDDEF statements and instructional routine with the GOSUB/RETURN statements, but they can’t be mixed together in one program. A structured routine begins with a DEF statement and ends with ENDDEF, you can define routines with any arity. Calling a sub routine is similar to calling a native scripting interface. It requires an explicit CALL statement, if a routine is lexically defined after calling.